Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
Calls are growing for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be removed from Congress. The freshman representative believes in QAnon conspiracies and has stalked Parkland school shooting survivors. She has said the Clintons killed JFK Jr. and has said in Facebook posts that have since been removed that certain Democratic leaders should be killed. And Jews started the California wildfires by shooting space lasers.
The representative who doesn’t believe school shootings happened sits on the Education Committee. Democrats are talking about removing her from her committee assignments, while some want her expelled from the House. But what would it take to remove her from Congress and how many other members of Congress have been expelled?
A member can be expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate by a vote of two-thirds of the members of that chamber voting. A vote of present or abstain doesn’t count toward that total.
In U.S. history, only 20 members have ever been expelled. Of those, 19 were Democrats and one was a Democratic-Republican, the precursor to the modern Democratic Party.
Of the 20 expelled, 14 were senators and three were representatives who were thrown out for supporting the Confederacy during the first two years of the Civil War.
Of the remaining three, one was Sen. William Blout who was expelled in 1797 for treason after attempting to aid the British who were seeking to conquer west Florida while it was still a Spanish possession.
The other two were Rep. Michael Myers, expelled in 1980 after being convicted of bribery, and Rep. Jim Traficant, expelled in 2002 after being convicted of 10 counts including bribery, racketeering and tax evasion. In 2020, Myers was again charged, this time for fraudulently stuffing ballot boxes in 2014, 2015 and 2015 primary elections in Philadelphia. The indictment came in July, long before any fake charges of voter fraud took place in the 2020 election.
A number of other members of Congress have resigned over the years when faced with an investigation aimed at expelling them.
In one early case, Sen. John Smith, Democratic Republican from Ohio, was accused of conspiring with Aaron Burr to invade Mexico and create a new country out west. Sen. John Quincy Adams, prior to his presidency, led the campaign to oust Smith, while Francis Scott Key, before writing the Star Spangled Banner, led the defense. The vote to expel failed, but two weeks later Smith resigned at the request of Ohio’s Legislature.
In more recent years, Bob Packwood, R-Oregon, resigned in 1995 after accusations of sexual misconduct. Rep Bob Ney, R-Ohio, resigned after being convicted of bribery, corruption, fraud and tax evasion.
Currently, House Democrats want Greene removed from her committee assignments. If removed from office, Greene would become the first Republican and the first woman in U.S. history expelled from Congress.
— David Taffet